From Great Lakes Bureau Chief Mary Ellen Geist:
This video (below) is the first of many features gleaned from Detroit Public Television’s Great Lakes Bureau’s series of upcoming documentaries which will be shown next spring.
This piece is a segment from a documentary titled “Seven Generation River” which will premiere on WORLD channel on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2018. It features the efforts of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians who were never removed from their ancestral lands in Michigan but saw their environment and way of life fractured over time. A small group of tribal citizens fought for decades to keep traditional ways alive. When the Federal Government recognized the Pokagon as a sovereign tribal nation in the early 1900’s, the tribe launched a series of cultural preservation and environmental restoration efforts. They are now actively working to restore their language and ways of life with traditional arts and by creating new traditions.
One of the ways they are preserving their culture is by reviving traditions linked to the cultivation of wild rice.
